Bridge Over Troubled Waters: United Nations Peacekeeping Operations through the Fog of Cold War, from International Security to Human Security.

This paper addresses United Nations (UN), an international organization (IO) and its performance in the fields of Security and Development from its conception in 1945 to its current situation. The focus of this research is a set of practices within UN that brings to surface a normative ambiguity in what comes to the social agents with which UN deals. Sovereign states are the prominent social agents within UN and outside UN as well in the modern international system. UN, a statist artifact, becomes embroiled in a series of complex, changing relationships with non-sovereign social agents. The paper makes use of some current trends in International Relations (IR) and Sociology literature, especially in what comes to sociology of organizations. As working hypothesis this paper proposes, firstly, that Security and Development crossed their respective bureaucratic borders within UN as a matter of problem-solving in the constrained context of Cold War superpower rivalry. Strands of emerging practices emerged within UN and were "consecrated" when Cold War drew to a close. The "vehicles" for such collaboration were peacekeeping operations (PKOs) and a set of renewed concepts of Development ("Human Development"). Secondly, the resulting "organizational synergy" implies a broadening of Security (detaching from traditional, state-centric approaches to re-focus on human beings) and Development (idem) conceptions within UN that the notion of "Human Security" (HS) currently tries to embody. HS becomes the framework for UN-non sovereigns partnerships; it brings to surface a set of ambiguities in what comes to the relationship between UN and its member-states. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]